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Stories and green tips related to nature, adventure, placemaking, and food systems, written by a beginning farmer/gardener and seasoned sustainability educator who loves to grow, cook, ferment, and eat local and ecologically happy food.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

"The Road to Climate Prosperity" eFair 2009

Imagine living in a completely sustainable society where the waste is reused, where energy and necessities come from within without exploitation of the land or natural resources. A 21st century society with the cars and airplanes and infrastructure we are used to, only greener. Gasoline becomes an antiquity, like candlestick holders are to us now, and clean fuel from plants, not fossil fuels, dominates. Imagine that in this society which could be taking place years from now, global warming is considered a scare we came through because of innovation, open-mindedness, and compassion for future generations. Don’t you want your children and grandchildren to live in this society? Or would you rather they live with catastrophic storms, a hotter climate that kills scores each time summer rolls around, world wars over the remaining natural resources used to fuel society, and a deep-set hatred for us, the generation of man that did nothing to stop global warming while we still had the chance? I don’t think so.

On Saturday, April 25, 2009, at my high school, the city’s second annual Environmental Fair took place. Booths with interesting facts, pledges to refuse water bottles (if you signed, you got a sunflower!), and environmental games for children lined a walkway. I didn't get a chance to see all of the booths, but one neat one had clothes and accessories made from old jeans and newspapers. Around 12 noon when I arrived, hotdogs, sodas, and popcorn were being sold, and General Jones, a band from San Francisco, was setting up. I signed the pledge (although I’d made that pledge to myself a year or so ago), and sat with my family at a lunch table, waiting for the keynote speaker, Dr. Marc Weiss, UN advisor and director of the Climate Prosperity project.

Bill Radulovich, principal at Walnut Grove Elementary School, came over to where we were sitting and said hello to my dad and step-mom. He asked what my name was and asked if he knew me. I told him yes, that I was in the STAND Club. Our club had hosted a screening of the film Fuel in March, the same film they were showing at the eFair at 1:00. Radulovich asked me if I’d introduce the film, and handed me a script. Sure, why not.

Radulovich then megaphoned everyone onto the grass to listen to the band, whose snare drum had just arrived. The attendees migrated toward the grassy knoll in the center of the campus, which is the demilitarized zone between the upper and lower classmen seating areas during a typical lunchtime on campus.

After the band played a song (they were pretty cool—interestingly, one of the members graduated from my high school in 2000), Radulovich spoke. This year’s eFair, he said, is under the title, “The Road to Climate Prosperity.” Last year’s “Flip That Switch” eFair had been in celebration of becoming the first ever solar school district. Each school site now has an eCoach, which Radulovich had instigated. The eCoaches help the schools save money by cutting back on energy consumption. Radulovich thanked Peak Energy Coalition for their green computing help within the district’s various school sites. The green computers have helped saved the district money and energy. This year’s eFair, Radulovich said, was in celebration of the first ever meeting of a council to discuss “climate prosperity,” which took place Friday the 24th in the Silicon Valley. Then Radulovich introduced Dr. Marc Weiss.

Dr. Marc Weiss, in a vibrant blue shirt with a gray blazer and sunglasses, a goatee covering his chin, began by talking about what is needed to save “human civilization and animal and plant life.” Appealing to the adults more than the children present, he said citizen activism. But then he turned to the children and younger people (a group of young girls were sitting front row and he looked toward them) and said we just need to think a little differently. Younger people have less set-in-stone ideas about the world and are better at doing this, he explained. Weiss gave an example of thinking differently: he’s been staying in one of the hotels downtown, and on this visit he, for the first time, asked himself where the leftover soap in hotels goes. When you go to a hotel on the first day, there’s a bar of soap and you unwrap it and use it. And then the next day there’s a new soap. What do they do with the first soap? They throw it away and it ends up in the landfill, one of the girls in the front answered. Yes, they do, he said. (I’ll take this opportunity to encourage you not to use the individually-wrapped soaps, shampoos, and shower caps they offer because they are a huge waste—bring your own!) And that shows that even though he’s an environmentally-conscious person, our society has so ingrained within us the acceptance of things the way they are that we often don’t think about where things go once they’re no longer within our possession. He called it the “mentality that’s killing us.” And that’s really true. We are so disconnected from nature, from the way our ancestors treated the Earth, that we waste things and throw things away without any twinge or question from our conscience. We no longer do things according to nature. We no longer have a balanced cycle with the Earth, and our waste and impact is increasing as the population of the world increases.

Weiss then talked about an innovative concept that Walmart’s thought up that has saved them 5% of their energy: they’ve started putting doors on the refrigerated sections, like they do in the frozen sections. How incredibly genius of them! Again, it shows that we just need to think differently and turn away from that idea that we can just waste and waste and that that makes us richer. By having a mindset like this, we continue to disregard the environment and pollute it, polluting ourselves and our atmosphere, and creating a worse climate problem than we have at the moment.

Weiss continued with the three phases of human civilization. First, he said, was “pre-industrial sustainability,” which didn’t come about because people were brilliant and enlightened to the idea of being sustainable, but because that is how nature works. Nature is sustainable. Our ancestors lived as one with the land and nature because they were still connected to their origin. But as man was able to find time for leisure and life beyond the basic necessities, he began to feel dominated by Mother Nature. And because we can be an ignorant, self-centered race, we looked for a way to make things easy for ourselves at the expense of nature. We started burning fossil fuels. And that brought us to the second phase, the one we’re in now: the industrial revolution and unsustainable world. The way he put it, it was as though mankind turned to Mother Nature and said “ha! I’ve conquered you!” We suddenly held the reins and we were free. No longer did we answer to Mother Nature. We had abundance through our exploits and we grew rich. And suddenly, being wasteful was a good thing because it reflected our abundance. That created the very mentality that environmentalists are trying to dissolve in themselves and in society. The year 1900 began the global rise in temperatures, and that’s actually quite fascinating; after thousands of years in phase one, phase two takes roughly a century to begin destroying our planet and atmosphere.

What’s worse, the United States leads the world in consumerism and waste. Though we make up only 4% of the world’s population, we consume 25% of the world’s resources. We’re imperialistic and we enjoy using things up and then discarding them after we’re finished. We find ways to get what we want; in our society, you can buy whatever you need. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, and you can guarantee it will come within a reasonable amount of time. That’s quite a modern concept, actually, and if you look at it from a historical perspective, it’s quite incredible—almost ridiculously so. But we rely on this, and this very thing fuels our crisis. For, each time we decide we need that designer jacket, or that new bike, or the newest Webkinz toy, we drive to the store and buy it. But how did it get to the store? Someone drove it there from a warehouse. Well, where was it before the warehouse? A factory somewhere. So someone drove the thing you want to buy from the warehouse to the store. But what if the item came from overseas? Then it was shipped across the ocean and then taken by train to trucks to the warehouse. That’s a lot of fuel being used up for someone to have a pair of shoes instantly, or to be able to go home right away and play with the bike or stuffed animal. And it seems to make the true cost of the item much greater. What if the items we bought cost the amount of fuel it took to import them? What if each time we purchased something we were told the amount of carbon emissions created from the transportation of that particular item? Do you think it would even make us stop and think?

And scarier than that, the world strives to be like us in that regard. Perhaps not Germany and other European countries, but the developing nations want to have the same economic prosperity we in America have. They want their own car and their own house and their own backyard, and why shouldn’t they? But they look to us as leaders and see our consumerism, our gas-guzzling Hummers, our instant access to the latest things—all of which include our dependency on oil—and they want that because it appears prosperous. And it is, until a point. There will come a time when the wars will only increase, the fighting will only become worse, and our fighting will all be over oil and water (not to mention the catastrophe global warming will wreak upon us). There are not enough resources to support an entire world population of people like United States citizens. And remember, we’re only 4% of the world. Imagine the damage even 50% would have on our Earth. Any hope of stopping global warming disappears when the entire world enters the picture as replicas of our current United States population. We can’t let our lifestyle influence the developing countries of today. But before we can tell these nations not to be like that, we have got to change our own mindset and lighten our consumerism and our dependency on oil. And we have to help them see the benefits of having a green society. Fortunately, there are people who are helping developing nations “green print” and use green technology. But we still have a problem.

There are many people who support the efforts to fight global warming, and many have changed their mindsets, as well as the mindsets of those around them, to be more sustainable. But what about the roughly 97% who don’t care? Most people just don’t care about the Earth, and, as Weiss said, scaring them into caring isn’t going to work. If we could convince everyone to care about the Earth, then we would all be “better off, healthier, have a higher quality of life, and have peace.” To fix this, we have to put ourselves back in balance with our living Earth. Her systems are off because of us, and we have to fix it. If we do nothing and leave the problem to the Earth to fix, we give our children and grandchildren a deadly Earth vastly different from the beautiful one we live on now. So we must fix it. But the problem is that because global warming cannot be seen, felt, or touched, people don’t see the need to change. By the time global warming can be felt and by the time they realize that they need to act, it will be too late and it will be in motion, unstoppable. So it brings us to the third phase, the one we have yet to live through, but hopefully get a chance to: industrial sustainability. There is one thing that everyone on the planet can agree on, Weiss said, and that is that “we all care about our own livelihood and well-being and the well-being of loved ones and of future generations.” That’s how we’ll get to the third phase, along with “innovation, efficiency, conservation, and use and reuse of all natural and human resources.” We remind people that we borrow this Earth from our children and that we have to respect it in order to give them the life we have, the life on Earth that is worth living.

Weiss ended his speech with the proposition that our town become a pilot for climate prosperity and sustainability. It brings economic development, jobs, and a better quality of life. He asked how many of us want to become a city with climate prosperity. All hands on the grassy knoll were raised.

After Dr. Weiss spoke, everyone headed toward the multipurpose room to watch a screening of the film Fuel, a documentary about America’s addiction to oil and the story of biodiesel, an alternative energy source that can run in a diesel engine without any modifications. Radulovich introduced me, and I gave the introduction to the film. Mr. Little, a math teacher at my school, high-fived me as I walked past after speaking. Then we all sat back, relaxed, and watched the two-hour film.

It was my second time seeing the film, and it was just as riveting and informational as the first time. The story is about Josh Tickell, author of Biodiesel America and the guy who drove his van around the country on biodiesel. The movie addresses everything from the Iraq war and 9/11'ss link to our oil dependency, to the 2008 news about the problems with biofuel, to the solution of how biofuel is good and how gasoline and oil dependency are really, really bad. The film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award and had 11 standing ovations, the most a film has ever had at Sundance. It is being shown in very few places, but hopefully will eventually make it to theaters or be available on DVD. It’s an important story with innovative, necessary solutions to our current problems. If you get a chance, I highly recommend seeing it.

And since my blog is beyond the point of quick reading, I will leave you with something I wrote in the barbershop after the eFair:

The first step in changing the direction our energy problem and dependency problem is heading toward is to change the public, social, and political mindset. The public must see the importance of stopping global warming. It isn’t just an environmental issue; it is a moral, humanitarian issue, an issue of compassion toward our children and grandchildren. Our social and political prejudices toward what we associate with environmentalism need to change. It isn’t only for long-haired, barefooted radicals. And it isn’t an issue of which political party supports it. It is an issue that we have created as a species, and it is one that will kill us if we don’t stop classifying it as something we just can’t or won’t do for whatever reason and pushing it aside as a conspiracy or as something that will only damage the oil companies and take jobs and economic opportunities away. It is humanity, and we, along with the rest of the Earth’s inhabitants are teetering on the edge of destruction. Our decision will either throw us a safety rope from which we can slowly be pulled to security, or it will shove us onto the rocks below where we will all face the consequences, along with those who come after us.

These are figures of "Ecocide". These are figures of "crimes against Nature". These are figures of "destruction of Ecosystems". These are figures of "Insanity, Abnormality and Criminality".

The link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues.

The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature [Animals, Trees, Air, Water and Land].

Destroy the system that has killed all ecosystems.

Chief Seattle of the Indian Tribe had warned the destroyers of ecosystems way back in 1854 :

Only after the last tree has been cut down,Only after the last river has been poisoned,Only after the last fish has been caught,Only then will you realize that you cannot eat money.

If men were smart, they would concentrate on conquering mother nature rather than competing against each other for income.

Ever wonder why it took so long for the Wright Brothers or Henry Ford to have competition? Neither fought competitors but went their own way inventing what they saw was needed. Isn't that why capitalism and patent systems exist?

Henry David Thoreau

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.